the next foreign trip to fall into place. England is one of the few countries to sustain a more-or-less habitual demarcation between ethnomusicologists and folk music scholars, and we could act to remove this. Folk music experts might find, once they have become familiar enough with the ethnomusicological literature to not feel alienated by our strange use of words like 'culture', that there are ideas in this writing that can be usefully applied in their own research. Ethnomusicology is essentially about 'people making music' or 'humanly-organized sound' (e-mail me if you'd like the references) which is what folk music studies focuses on too, so it should be possible to add useful aspects of ethnomusicological enquiry to folk music research without giving up existing perspectives. The reading list set to MMus trainees in ethnomusicology at Sheffield, for instance, (and presumably elsewhere too) refers to musical traditions from all around the world, yet, thinking about it, all these writings would have pertinence to someone intending primarily to research musical life in Britain, or planning on gaining an academic qualification for research work already ongoing in that field. These are not so much different fields as overlapping sets with much common ground but somewhat differentemphases. In the end, it is up to the individual researcher to decide which questions to ask and what to do with the answers. ...
